CLAIRE MOON

PRELAPSARIAN STATE:
FORGIVENESS AND RECONCILIATION IN TRANSITIONAL
JUSTICE1

ABSTRACT. Since South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC),

‘reconciliation’ is now an authoritative discourse governing political transition.
Reconciliation governs the ‘moral reordering’ of national communities in the wake
of conflict and transition to more democratic regimes by enquiring into, and
attempting to address, past gross violations of human rights perpetrated, in the main,
against civilian populations by the state and its agents. Reconciliation eschews
retributive justice in favour of ‘restorative’ modes of ‘dealing with the past’, and has
come, broadly, to be institutionalised by the truth commission. South Africa’s TRC
animated theological discourses of forgiveness and Christian reconciliation in order
to legitimise and endow with moral resonance the project of transitional justice. This
article enquires into the political effects of such an animation, and investigates the
performance of forgiveness and reconciliation as metaphor and narrative.

1. INTRODUCTION

‘Reconciliation’ is an authoritative trope governing transitional justice.

It is propagated, promoted and enforced by NGOs, international flows
of ‘reconciliation experts’, and newly proliferating centres funding
research and offering assistance to states undergoing transition,
whether from conflict to peace or to more democratic governance.2

1
I am indebted to Andy Schaap for his insightful comments, and to the organisers
and participants in the ‘Images and Narratives of International Law’ workshop,
University of Utrecht, November 2003, especially Ronnie Lippens and Wouter
Werner.
2
For example, Chilean lawyers and human rights experts visited South Africa
and helped shape the early stages of its reconciliation process. Subsequently, South
Africa exported its reconciliation expertise to Northern Ireland and the then Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia to assist in setting up reconciliation processes and pro-
grammes. Truth commissions as assumed conduits of ‘reconciliation’ have prolifer-
ated since the advent of the TRC. Examples include Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Peru,
and a number of different commissions in the various states of the former Yugo-
slavia. The Centre for Transitional Justice in New York is a notable example of a
new organisation funding research programmes on reconciliation.

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Revue Internationale de Se´miotique Juridique 17: 185–197, 2004.

2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
186 CLAIRE MOON

Reconciliation seeks to shape the political imagination of transition,

governing the ‘moral reordering’ of national communities in the wake
of conflict by addressing gross violations of human rights perpetrated
against civilian populations by, mainly, the state and its agents.
Redress for state violations through reconciliatory political pro-
cesses has, in recent decades, seen its formalisation in the institution
of the truth commission of which South Africa’s Truth and Recon-
ciliation Commission (TRC) is widely regarded to be the archetype.
Born out of a political compromise that precluded criminal trials, the
TRC was driven by a ‘restorative’ interpretation of justice that
claimed to prioritise reparations for ‘victims’, and, controversially,
offer amnesty to ‘perpetrators’.3 Restorative justice attempts to
acknowledge and compensate the traumatic experiences of victims.
Concomitantly, it suggests that perpetrators should not be punished
but ‘reincorporated’ into the community and their ‘humanity’
restored, to which end amnesty is, ostensibly, addressed. Restorative
justice feeds into reconciliatory political projects that seek, on the one
hand, to transform the national polity, and simultaneously signal to
the ‘international community’ their readiness to belong to an inter-
national ‘democratic order’. As such, reconciliation functions as a
strategy of domestic and international ordering.
The TRC offered a striking formulation of restorative justice that
made intrinsic to its political project of national unity a Christian
interpretation of reconciliation. The TRC argued that ‘confession,
forgiveness, and reconciliation in the lives of nations are not just airy-
fairy religious and spiritual things, nebulous and unrealistic’ but are
‘the stuff of practical politics’,4 an interpretation of political recon-
ciliation that was primarily driven by Desmond Tutu, Chair of the
TRC. As such, a theological rendering of reconciliation which
incorporated forgiveness, was the public discourse through which the
moral and ethical reordering of the nation was most resolutely

3
The offer of amnesty for ‘perpetrators’ was the key mechanism of the TRC, but
amnesty is often mistakenly understood to be a central feature of truth commissions
in general. However, only South Africa integrated an amnesty feature into its
investigations by offering amnesty to ‘perpetrators’ in return for ‘the truth’ about
past violations. In prior cases either a pre-existing amnesty law was invoked, for
example in Chile, or an amnesty ruling issued within days of the commissions’ report
being issued, as in El Salvador.
4
TRC Report, 5(9) 4. Further, the TRC stated that gestures of apology and
forgiveness were ‘important in the public life of a nation attempting to transcend the
divisions and strife of the past’, TRC Report, 1(5) 21.
 PRELAPSARIAN STATE 187

articulated and institutionalised. The effect of this, as I will argue,

was that the subjects of the reconciliation story – ‘victim’ and ‘per-
petrator’ – were narrated by the TRC as if they were emerging out of
a violent rupture to a previously harmonious relationship. By way of
addressing this rupture, forgiveness and reconciliation worked to
produce the effect of ‘recovering’ a ‘lost harmony’ between ‘victim’
and ‘perpetrator’, which, in turn, sought to underpin the project of
national unity.
Transitional justice, once conditioned by theological narratives of
forgiveness and Christian reconciliation, performs in contradictory
ways because Christian narratives and metaphors at once constrain,
but simultaneously provide the imaginative terrain within which
political reconciliation might be negotiated. I argue that reconcilia-
tion as narrative scripts the terms on which reconciliation is to take
place restrictively, by presupposing the idea of ‘return’ as its point of
closure. In contrast, reading reconciliation as a metaphor opens a
space for politics due to its indeterminacy, which enables the terms
upon which reconciliation is negotiated to be contested. Whilst this
article reflects generally upon the political animation of theological
discourse, it takes the TRC as its main focus because it provided the
theatrical space within which forgiveness and reconciliation were
played out, and also because it influenced immeasurably a myriad of
subsequent reconciliatory political projects.

2. FORGIVENESS: A POLITICAL ‘GIFT’

My first thoughts on forgiveness were provoked by a conversation I

had with Charles Villa Vicencio at a conference in 1998. Villa
Vicencio, a theologian and one of the TRC’s commissioners, related
to me a discussion he had had with Derrida who was visiting South
Africa. Whilst the two of them were discussing forgiveness over
dinner, Derrida declared that forgiveness should not be incorporated
into politics. Forgiveness, he argued, is radically at odds with politics
because it is a ‘freely given gift’. Villa Vicencio replied, ‘well, if that’s
what you think, then you’re more of a theologian than I am!’’
Derrida’s provocation merits investigation because the metaphor of
the ‘gift’ offers a telling insight into the nature of political forgiveness,
which as Derrida argues is ‘anything but pure and disinterested’.5

5
Derrida, J., On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001), 31.
188 CLAIRE MOON

But before considering the implications of Derrida’s critique it is

necessary to enquire first into what the ‘regular formula’ of forgive-
ness comprises. Forgiveness is commonly understood as an individual
gesture of clemency towards a ‘wrongdoer’ and is directed towards a
‘reconciliation’ of those it engages. Broadly speaking, in Christian
theology, reconciliation assumes a rupture in a previously harmoni-
ous relationship, a rupture alleged to be repaired by confession and a
display of remorse on the part of a ‘perpetrator’ met, in turn, by
forgiveness on the part of the ‘victim’. The offer of forgiveness, and
hence the possibility of reconciliation, demands that the perpetrator
acknowledge responsibility for the deed, a responsibility which must
be made manifest in a sincere and outward show of remorse which
evinces an alteration of an inner attitude. It is upon this outward
display that forgiveness, necessarily, is contingent, and in which it has
faith. Once the conditions of sincerity are believed by the victim to
have been met, the offender might be released from the moral debt
incurred by the wrong through an offer of forgiveness.
For forgiveness to be possible, it must be situated within a recog-
nition, or precomprehension of its meaning, and comprise a face-to-
face encounter which, as Derrida argues, is ‘required by the very
essence of forgiveness’6. The immediacy of this performance of con-
fession, remorse, and forgiveness, sanctions the transaction and lends
force to its application. The direct exchange of forgiveness is a nec-
essary constituent of reconciliation since, as Hannah Arendt notes,
‘forgiving. . . enacted in solitude or isolation remain[s] without reality
and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self ’.7
Still, a declaration of remorse is not a guarantee of ‘authentic’
repentance, nor of its acceptance by the victim as an adequate gesture
of repair. Forgiveness cannot be expected ‘as if it were an entitlement
flowing from a contract’, but is a ‘gift’ which may be only be hoped
for.8 It must remain ‘freely given’ and unconstrained by the demands
and expectations of a contractual engagement. This interpretation of
forgiveness concurs with Paul Ricoeur’s description in which he
6
Derrida, J., On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 48.
7
Arendt, H., The Human Condition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1953), 237. Arendt deems forgiveness to be a personal or individual process, claiming
that ‘forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal
affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it’, 241.
8
Holiday, A., ‘‘Forgiving and forgetting: the Truth and Reconciliation Com-
mission’’, in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past: The Making of
Memory in South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 45.
 PRELAPSARIAN STATE 189

argues that ‘forgiveness… far exceeds political categories’. Forgiveness

belongs ‘to an order – the order of charity – which goes even beyond
the order of morality’ and ‘falls within the scope of an economy of the
gift whose logic of superabundance exceeds the logic of reciprocity’.9
Ricoeur, like Derrida, deploys the metaphor of forgiveness as a
‘freely given gift’ in order to demonstrate its transformational
capacity. Through his appeal to the realm of ‘charity’ he invokes the
theological, implying that forgiveness, besides being in excess of
politics, ‘goes beyond’ morality, and has a ‘logic of superabundance’
that defies that of reciprocity and as such carries the potential for
transformation, for ‘overcoming’ past conflict.
According to Derrida, however, forgiveness loses its ‘pure and
disinterested’ character once incorporated into political process. Once
it is institutionalised and arbitrated by the state, forgiveness loses its
necessarily spontaneous and contingent nature, and seeks recourse to
the economic logic of reciprocity central to political process and to
retributive justice: the principle of the lex talionis, ‘an eye for an eye’.
‘One could never’ remarks Derrida, ‘in the ordinary sense of the
word, found a politics or law on forgiveness… because it always has
to do with negotiations… with calculated transactions, with condi-
tions…’.10 Is forgiveness, then, necessarily beyond politics? And, once
subsumed into the political, does it take on a contractual character
that obviates its transformational capacity? A closer enquiry into
forgiveness in the TRC sheds some light on these speculations.
The TRC traded amnesty to perpetrators in exchange for full
confessions about human rights violations perpetrated in the course of
violent political conflict during apartheid between the years of 1960
and 1994. This bargain reflected the precondition of ‘peace’ set out by
the National Party during negotiations, primarily with the African
National Congress, in 1991. The National Party refused to co-operate
in South Africa’s transition without a guarantee that its members
would not be subjected to political trials. Following on from these
negotiations, a ‘restorative’ justice process granting amnesty to per-
petrators and reparations to victims was settled. As part of this
restorative, or reconciliatory project, Tutu, in official declarations and
during the public hearings appealed to victims to forgive those who
fully and remorsefully confessed their crimes by way of legitimising

9
Ricoeur, P., ‘‘Reflections on a new ethos for Europe’’, in Richard Kearney (ed.),
The Hermeneutics of Action (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 10.
10
Derrida, J., On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 39.
190 CLAIRE MOON

the amnesty decision.11 The TRC argued that in turn, perpetrators,

having benefited first from apartheid and second, from the TRC’s
amnesty provision, had incurred a social debt that required ‘repay-
ment’ in order that the conditions of reconciliation be fulfilled:
... those who have benefited and are still benefiting from a range of unearned priv-
ileges under apartheid have a crucial role to play. Although this was not part of the
Commission’s mandate, it was recognised as a vital dimension of national recon-
ciliation. This means that a great deal of attention must be given to an altered sense
of responsibility; namely the duty or obligation of those who have benefited so much
(through racially privileged education, unfair access to land, business opportunities
and so on) to contribute to the present and future reconstruction of our society.12

The TRC’s model of forgiveness appeared to negotiate contractual

relations of obligation between perpetrators and victims. This con-
tractual agreement might be characterised as follows: in forgiving,
victims agree to give up the right to perpetuate old grievances and to
accept the reparations made to them, spiritual and material, and in
being forgiven, perpetrators are bound not to repeat violations and
constructively to make amends.
This formula was problematic for several reasons. First, it
depended upon a clarity of distinction between victims and perpe-
trators, a distinction that was not always evident, as the TRC notes:
A further problem of perspective is the thorny question of whether perpetrators may
also be viewed as victims. Although one may wish to have a clear-cut position on
perpetrators it is possible that there are grey areas. Perpetrators may be seen as
acting under orders, as subjects of indoctrination, as subjected to threats, as out-
comes of earlier doctrinaire education. In the most pernicious situation, askaris
(former ANC cadres who were ‘turned’ frequently through torture, threats and
brutality, into state agents) are themselves transformed into killers and torturers.
Military conscripts could view themselves in part as victims of a state system... it is
important to recognise that perpetrators may in part be victims’...13

Second, it produced confusion about the role of the TRC and how
forgiveness was part of the amnesty process. This was because

11
This was made difficult by the fact that the TRC did not provide a forum
through which encounters between victims and perpetrators were possible. Only on
occasion and by accident, did such encounters take place.
12
TRC Report, 1(5) 111. Further, restorative justice ‘demands that the account-
ability of perpetrators be extended to making a contribution to the restoration of the
well-being of their victims’, TRC Report, 1(5) 100.
13
TRC Report, 5(7) 53–54.
 PRELAPSARIAN STATE 191

amnesty was not contingent upon an offer of forgiveness on the part

of the victim, but was granted by the TRC in return, simply, for a
‘full confession’. Indeed, forgiveness may even have been withheld,
but amnesty could still be forthcoming. And third, the incentive of
amnesty, and the publicity and exposure inherent in making an in-
stutionalised confession problematised the possibility of a ‘freely
made’, and hence genuinely remorseful, confession:
Confession typically presupposes a constellation of notions about the private self
tormented by guilt and the private conscience exposed to self-criticism. However, the
fact that people confess to their crimes does not necessarily imply a compulsion to
confess as an escape from a burden of guilt… the conscience of memory may be less at
stake that the fear of exposure... Confessions… are constructed and not discovered.14

Because the TRC offered the incentive of amnesty in return for ‘full
confessions’, it disturbed the interpersonal and spontaneous economy
of ‘ideal’ forgiveness. The confessional mode presupposes a knowing,
self-consciously acting and hence fully responsible agent, endowed
with the capacity to reflect and ‘reform’. However, because the pri-
vate process of self-reflection and questioning was replaced by a
public spectacle, any incumbent show of remorse was consequently
not to be ‘trusted’ as an outward articulation of internal change
because it was not ‘freely’ produced but demanded by the state.
Against Derrida, however, there is something of value to be
recovered from an economic interpretation of forgiveness which a
reading of Marcel Mauss’s anthropological classic, The Gift, reveals.15
Mauss puts forward an understanding of the gift that stands in con-
trast to Derrida’s aneconomic interpretation because he interprets the
gift as being incorporated within, rather than being excessive to, a
‘general economy’ of exchange. In opposition to Malinowski, who
attempted to separate the activities of commerce from gift giving,
Mauss asserted that the obligation to reciprocate the gift sets up a
perpetual cycle of exchange. In his view, gifts are not separate from,
but constitute a part of this general system of exchange which includes

14
Nuttall, S., ‘‘Telling ‘free’ stories? Memory and democracy in South African
autobiography since 1994’’, in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past,
87.
15
Originally published by Presses Universitaires de France, 1950 as Essai Sur le
Don, and first published in Britain as The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in
Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990).
192 CLAIRE MOON

the commercial, and works similarly to incur a debt on behalf of the

recipient.16 For Mauss, the ‘free’ gift is a nonsense because it is based
on a ‘misunderstanding’ which exempts the donor from return gifts
from the recipient and challenges the way in which the gift constitutes
social relations. A free gift, as Mary Douglas notes, is ‘a gift that does
nothing to enhance solidarity’ and is therefore a ‘contradiction’.17 The
‘refusal of requital’ that the free gift institutes puts the act of giving
outside the constitution of mutual and social ties, which removes it, on
this account, from the service of political reconciliation.
However, for Derrida, the transformational properties of the gift
are obviated if it is subsumed under the general economy of exchange
and reciprocation. He regards the act of giving as necessarily outside
the cycle of exchange, and by implication beyond the construction of
mutual ties. Derrida’s rejection of any reciprocal relation in the gift is
due to what he considers ‘an immoral binding of free subjects’.18 He
describes Mauss’s linking of ‘gift’ and exchange’ as a nonsense, for
gifts should not be instigated with the intention of being reciprocated.
He proposes the impossible – a gift that is neither consciously given,
nor consciously received. For Derrida, only such an impossible gift
can shake itself free from the constitution of relations of obligation
and reciprocity that an economic interpretation enforces.19 The
‘miraculous’, or the transformational, can only be performed by the
offering of a gift which, by its nature, supersedes, or is surplus to that
of the closed cycle of transactions. If, and this is a very big ‘if’, the gift
of forgiveness could present a rupture to the exchange cycle, it might
performatively constitute the break with the past that is repeatedly
cited by the TRC as a desirable outcome of its investigations.
We are left with a paradoxical and perhaps incommensurable view
of the possibilities of forgiveness, but a fairly unequivocal view of the
nature of its political animation, a view that confirms Derrida’s

16
However, and importantly, Mauss constructs an overly synthetic account of
‘human solidarity’ in which ‘the whole society can be described by the catalogue of
transfers that map all the obligations between its members’ as Mary Douglas notes in
her introduction to the text, ‘No free gifts’, Mauss, The Gift, ix.
17
Douglas, M., ‘‘No Free Gifts’’, in Mauss, The Gift, vii.
18
O’Neill, J., ‘‘What Gives (with Derrida)?’’ The European Journal of Social
Theory 2(2) (1999), 131.
19
O’Neill criticises Derrida for his aneconomic interpretation, and decontextu-
alisation of the gift, claiming that ‘there is no society whose members do not
understand the language games of economic exchange and gift exchange that obtain
in kin and non-kin relations’, 133.
 PRELAPSARIAN STATE 193

suspicion. Forgiveness promises, on Derrida’s account, to transform

conflict, to move beyond the cycle of equivalent exchanges and
institute a new order. An economic interpretation necessitates a
reconciliation founded upon, as the TRC states, ‘an altered sense of
responsibility’ in return for wrongs committed. This, however, if it
were possible to inculcate, might provide a more fruitful and prag-
matic foundation upon which future ‘reconciliation’ might rest.

3. RECONCILIATION

Early in the TRC’s proceedings, Desmond Tutu invoked reconcilia-

tion in the following way:
Having looked the beast of the past in the eye, having asked and received forgiveness
and having made amends, let us shut the door on the past – not in order to forget it
but in order not to allow it to imprison us. Let us move into the glorious future of a
new kind of society where people count not because of biological irrelevancies or
other extraneous attributes, but because they are persons of infinite worth created in
the image of God.20

Tutu’s words call upon the prelapsarian human condition – the

moment of creation – and hail a return to a condition of harmony
and unity that preceded ‘The Fall’. It is this notion that forms the
core of reconciliation in Tutu’s invocation, and it subjects the South
Africa to a seamless continuity of representation that stretches back
to the ‘beginning of human time’. Reconciliation, on this reading,
seeks to cohere divergent narratives about the past by evoking the
idea of ‘return’, a return to an originary, unified, harmonious social
and political formation which, it assumes, preceded the ‘breakdown’
that transitional politics seeks to redress. Reconciliation performs in
order to suggest that a condition of national harmony and accord in
South Africa actually did exist prior to its alleged ‘rupture’. All this,
as Antjie Krog notes, in the context of South Africa’s ‘stark cir-
cumstances’ in which there is ‘nothing to go back to, no previous
state or relationship one would wish to restore’.21
In order to investigate how the effect of ‘return’ is produced, it is
necessary to enquire into the performance of reconciliation as both

20
TRC Report, 1(1) 91.
21
Krog, A., Country of My Skull (London: Vintage, 1999), 108. Krog notes that
‘‘reconciliation does not even seem like the right word, but rather ‘conciliation’’’ .
194 CLAIRE MOON

narrative and metaphor, an enquiry which reveals reconciliation to

perform in different and contradictory ways.22
Interpretations of reconciliation are haunted, overwhelmingly, by
the idea of a ‘return’. To reconcile is to ‘restore a person to friendly
relations with oneself or another after an estrangement’, to ‘restore to
concord or harmony’, to ‘reunite’, to ‘bring a person (back to) peace,
favour, etc,’ to ‘cleanse, purify, reconsecrate’, to ‘absolve’ or to ‘bring
into acquiescence with, acceptance of, or submissions to a thing,
condition, or situation’. The condition of reconciliation is described
variously as ‘the action or act of reconciling a person to oneself or
another, or estranged parties to one another’, or ‘harmony, concord’,
and, in Christian theology, ‘the condition of humanity’s being rec-
onciled with God’.23
The ‘return’ underwrites the narrative performance of reconcilia-
tion, because ‘re’ denotes a move backwards in the sense that it
implies a return to an earlier state of harmonious union. Reconcili-
ation is a story told in a single word. It tells a tale of prior harmony, a
rupture (a wrong perpetrated), and a subsequent reunion, predicated,
at least within the Christian paradigm, on the confessional and for-
giveness. Reconciliation relates the implied events in its tale in a
causal and linear fashion – union, rupture, reunion – and prefigures
narrative closure as reconciliation, the end point of the story. Rec-
onciliation bears a reverse trajectory in time. It looks back the way,
despite being oriented towards change and closure in the future.
However, if we read reconciliation as a metaphor, we find a more
‘open’ and plural account. Metaphors carry a descriptive and a pre-
scriptive force and ‘describe the enigma and promise of the human
situation and prescribe certain remedies for that situation’.24 Meta-
phor combines two or more domains of meaning which give rise to
multiple interpretations of what reconciliation might mean. For
example, to say that ‘love is a battlefield’ is to suggest an equivalence
between ‘love’ and ‘battlefield,’ and to propose a transferable simi-
larity between the two. In juxtaposing two terms, metaphor com-
22
Reconciliation can be described as a coupling of narrative form and meta-
phorical process. For a detailed discussion of how this point see Ricoeur, P., ‘‘The
Specificity of Religious Language’’, Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical
Criticism 4 (1975), 107–145.
23
All definitions taken from The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993).
24
Tracy, D., ‘‘Metaphor and Religion: The Test Case of Christian Texts’’ in
S. Sacks (ed.), On Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 89.
 PRELAPSARIAN STATE 195

prises meanings related to both, but at the same time generates a third
dimension of meaning constituted by the two aspects and their
relation to one another, which is at the same time surplus to both.
However, as Ricoeur notes, metaphor does not have to comprise two
distinct elements, but ‘takes the word as its unit of reference’.25 The
range of ‘transferences’ of meaning are not simply generated by the
constituent elements, but also by the social or political site of utter-
ance. Thus, in its performance of ‘reconciliation’, the TRC consti-
tuted a nexus between different domains of meaning, the theological
and political, and was the site through which the transference of the
properties of the Christian range of interpretations of reconciliation
to the realm of the political was facilitated and took place. An
important effect of this was that the Christian connotations of rec-
onciliation worked to extend its meaning beyond the idea of a prag-
matic settlement or agreement, with the effect of representing human
actions ‘as higher than they actually are’, of elevating human conduct
and experience.26 This functioned to endow the TRC with the
appearance of a transcendent moral authority.
Simultaneously, the fusion of theological principle and political
process generated debate and contestation about what reconciliation
might mean, and produced conflicting versions of reconciliation
ranging from the theological to the political, to non-racial ideologies
of reconciliation put forward by political parties, civil society actors,
amongst others.27
Reading reconciliation as narrative and metaphor renders a dou-
ble interpretation of reconciliation possible. One of these readings
suggests that reconciliation as narrative ‘closes off ’ plurality and
debate because it seeks to cohere and unify divergent perspectives on
the past. But on the other hand, reconciliation works as metaphor to
suggest a plurality of competing interpretations as to what it might
mean. When understood in this way, reconciliation demands not, as
Aletta Norval notes, ‘a simple restoration of a community with itself
and to itself ’, but ‘a difficult, restless and unceasing negotiation’

25
Ricoeur, P., The Rule of Metaphor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 3.
26
Ricoeur, P., ‘‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’’, New Lit-
erary History 6 (1974), 109.
27
Very seldom did interpretations converge. For a discussion of this see Hamber
B., and van der Merwe, H., ‘‘What is this thing called Reconciliation?’’, Centre for
the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, http://sunsite.wits.ac.za/csvr/art-
rcb&h.htm
196 CLAIRE MOON

which materialises in political debate and contestation and is fun-

damental to democratic process.28
The political animation of religious metaphors and narratives
might also provide the occasion for a different way of doing justice
because they appear to interrupt the regime of retributive justice,
which, founded upon vengeance and arbitrated by the state, seems
fated to reproduce the very conditions it aims to redress.29 As a result
it threatens to further, rather than stem, cycles of violence. On this
theme, Michael Dillon excoriates the sovereign limits of the ‘normal
model of justice’, arguing that this legal paradigm issues from ven-
geance and from a system of analogous exchanges that can only serve
to sustain the conditions it seeks to absolve.30 However, for Dillon,
the possibility of ‘another justice’ haunts the given order and, refusing
to accept the present given as necessary and inevitable, he offers a
critical proposition that is ‘neither a supposedly habitual tradition’
nor a ‘contractual negotiation’.31 Dillon echoes Derrida’s reflections
on justice, friendship, and democracy in this spectral evocation, and
appeals to the unwritten character of justice, that element that resides
beyond the textual codifications and disciplinary practices state
endorsed and enforced rule of law.32 This spectral justice, he argues,
is instead an ‘irruptive and inventive practice called up by specific
historical circumstances’.33
Forgiveness and reconciliation might appear as such an irruption,
and a pragmatic response to the impossibility of adjudication and
judgement that Dillon suggests is symptomatic of the ‘ineradicable’
plethos of the self, and the acceptance that there can be no sovereign
point of departure from which to cast judgement.34 Forgiveness is-
sues, necessarily, from diffuse subjectivities and promises a different
28
Norval, A., ‘‘Truth and Reconciliation: the Birth of the Present and the
Reworking of History’’, Journal of Southern African Studies. 25(3) (1999), 510.
29
That retribution is founded upon vengeance is, however, a flawed claim,
although one forcefully advanced by the TRC in its repudiation of the retributive
paradigm. For a discussion of the problematic conflation of retribution with ven-
geance see Crocker, D., ‘‘Retribution and Reconciliation’’, http://www.puaf.
umd.edu/IPPP/Winter-Spring00/retribution_and_reconciliation.htm
30
Dillon, M., ‘‘Another Justice’’, Political Theory 27(2) (1999).
31
Dillon, M., ‘‘Another Justice’’, 172.
32
See Derrida, J., Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994), and The Politics of Friendship
(London: Verso, 1997).
33
Dillon, M., ‘‘Another Justice’’ 172.
34
Dillion, M., ‘‘Another Justice’’ 157.
 PRELAPSARIAN STATE 197

way of doing justice that carries the hope of discontinuing the system
of equivalent exchanges and the cycle of vengeance at the heart of
retributive justice.
But on closer inspection, as I have indicated, the TRC reveals itself
to be based on the contractual negotiations that Dillon eschews.
Forgiveness in the TRC is based upon a system of obligation and
reciprocity, and the reconciliation metaphor works also to invoke a
prior, harmonious community and attempts to produce a coherent
narrative about the past. Hence it can be argued that religious dis-
courses work against constituting different political configurations
and allegiances. They perform, once incorporated into political pro-
cess, in order to reify the national boundaries of community and the
contractual relations adjudicated by the state, and to re-establish the
boundaries of the existing legal order.
It is important to be open to the ways in which Christian meta-
phors and narratives may answer to the ‘call of another justice’, but it
is equally important to remain attentive to the way in which they also
operate as a refutation of that call. They are, perhaps, ultimately
resistant to plural interpretation as they carry the trace of a founding
moment that is formulaic and cannot be refigured in response to the
particular circumstances in which they are invoked.

Department of Sociology
Centre for the Study of Human Rights
London School of Economics
10 Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
UK
E-mail: C.Moon@lse.ac.uk